Page 1 | June 2003 | Vol 30  No 6 | Index | Page 2

FROM THE DIRECTOR…

Dear Fellow Missionaries,

It is a delight at the age of 65 to begin this new role of Director of the Dominican Mission Foundation.  I am thrilled to have this opportunity to share with you the news of our missionaries and the people they, and you, serve.

From 1969 until 1977, Fr. Paul Scanlon served as the Provincial of our Western Dominican Province.  During his term as Provincial, he was deeply involved in the work at our Chiapas Mission in Mexico.   He shares with you in this issue one of his sad but beautiful experiences in our Ocosingo Parish.  Your support continues our present ministry in the Ocosingo Parish, which now serves around 1,000 Indian communities.

Fr. Paul is now finishing a term as the Prior of St. Albert Priory, our Dominican House of Formation in Oakland, California.  His zeal for missionary activity will again be satisfied by his next assignment as pastor of St. Christopher by the Sea Church at Dutch Harbour in the Aleutians of Alaska, where I am sure he will have many more tender stories to share with us about the people he will be serving, and the ways their lives can illustrate the Gospel for us.

In Christ’s peace,
Fr. Martin de Porres Walsh, O.P.

Not a Sparrow Falls

By Fr. Paul Scanlon, OP

The tropical rain pounded the sixteenth-century church so hard it was nearly impossible for us to hear one another, a great excuse to take a break from our staff meeting.  My fellow Chiapas missionary team members and I stepped outside, stood under the eaves, and chatted idly until we noticed an indigenous man standing in the cloister garden.

He had no umbrella, no rain gear.   Apparently beaten down by more than the storm – perhaps even unaware of the foul weather – he didn’t move.  I wish I could say I rushed over to help him, but I didn’t.  Another team member, Sister Mari, stepped out into the rain and led him inside.  She dried him off.   Fluent in Tzeltal, she listened to his story.

His name was Manuel.  His wife had just died, and he didn’t know what to do or where to go.  We agreed that Sister Mari would accompany him to the carpenter’s shop and have a casket made while the rest of us went back inside the church to continue our meeting.

That evening after dinner, Sister Mari and I, accompanied by Father Vincent [Foerstler, O.P.], the pastor, headed out in the mission’s truck to pick up the grieving widower and the coffin.  We loaded the simple pine box into the truck bed, and then Manuel and I climbed in beside it.  By now the storm had passed through Ocosingo and was headed toward Guatemala, but the road was thick with mud as we drove off beyond the edge of town and past the last few houses and their faint lights.

Manuel told us when to stop.  It wasn’t just in the middle of nowhere; it was in the middle of a pitch-black, sloppy, muddy no-where.  We slid the box out and began our trek to Manuel’s house.  He and Sister Mari, holding a flashlight, led the way.  Father Vincent and I carried the coffin, hoisting it above our heads as we crossed through a deep culvert filled with rushing water.  Then, after climbing up the other side, we crossed a field in pure blackness except for the flashlight’s faint beam.

After a couple hundred yards Manuel told us to stop.  We had arrived.   He lived in the field.  His house, his home made of sugar cane and pine branches woven together, had no lights, no driveway, no address.  As the beam of the flashlight splashed against the tiny structure, I could see a small opening in the curved roof and a wisp of smoke.  The house had no chimney. 

Father Vincent and I got down on our knees to shove the box inside.  We eased it alongside the body of Manuel’s wife, which was lying on the wet earth in the one-room hut.   A small fire was burning on the floor.  It was mostly a handful of embers, but the occasional flicker of flame showed that the woman had been in her mid thirties.  I can’t tell you her name; I never learned it.

With difficulty, Father Vincent and I lifted her to place her in the casket.   Not accustomed to this kind of fact-to-face encounter with the dead body, I was startled by the gurgling of fluids as we lowered her into the box.  As the pastor began to slide one end of the coffin lid toward me, a young boy slipped between us.  I hadn’t seen him in the semidarkness; my attention had been fixed upon the dead woman.

The young son was saying goodbye to his mother.  He gently straightened out the woman’s hair, wiped the moisture and bits of mud from her face, and kissed her on the forehead.  No one moved as he took a petate – a light bedroll – and laid it over her in a simple gesture of love and farewell.  Father Vincent and I resumed positioning the lid and used rocks from the field to pound the nails into place.   We later learned that on the following day, prisoners from a nearby jail were escorted out to the field to dig a grave and bury her. >>>